instrument manufacturer to provide a more turn key Vl'-Raman system has become apparent. It is nowappropriate to examine several of the spectroscopic operations which are routine for the FT4R experiment asthey relate to the FT-Raman experiment. Some of these operations include the ability to create and searchspectral databases for qualitative analysis and to use commercially available chemometric methods forquantitative analysis.Quantitative analysis by Raman spectroscopy using external standards has proven difficult owing to theeffects of instrumental parameters which can alter the reproducibility of band intensities from scan to scan.However, near-infrared FT-Raman spectroscopy has several advantages over the traditional dispersivetechnique which may make quantitative FF-Raman feasible. 1,2 One principal advantage of the VF-Ramantechnique is the fact that the entire spectrum is sampled with each scan, and each scan can take less than onesecond to acquire. Thus, the FT-technique may be less sensitive to instrument drift as these effects areaveraged over the entire spectrum. In addition, the entrance aperture of the interferometer system is large,making the sampling geometry less sensitive to absolute repositioning of the sample cell.1'2 Finally, theresolution and throughput are constant across the entire spectral range. These features mean that spectrawith a high degree of reproducibility can be acquired using very simple experimental geometries.The test of subtraction in the ET-Raman serves to verify both the reproducibility of the sampling as well asthe linearity of the detection system. In this test, a spectrum obtained by subtraction of the two alternateisomers of xylene from the isomer of interest can be directly compared with that obtained from the neatsample of the isomer. It is of particular interest to examine the areas of significant band overlap, where thequestion of detector linearity is key. Figure 1 shows the results obtained on the first set of mixtures of the

Three fundamental behaviors of vibrational spectroscopy data manipulation routinely associated with Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy are evaluated for near-infrared (NIR) Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy. Spectral reproducibility, spectral subtraction and sensitivity are examined relative to the NIR FT-Raman experiment. Quantitative predictive ability is compared for identical sets of samples containing mixtures of the three xylene isomers. Partial least-squares analysis is used to compare predictive ability. IR performance is found to be better than Raman, though the potential for method development using NIR FT-Raman is shown to be quite promising.